The invention relates to a system for conveying a group of items from one place to another, and more particularly to a conveyor system for moving a group of items by associating the items from a plurality of sources into a uniformly distributed group.
A problem faced in many manufacturing operations is that a first step cannot be performed as rapidly as a second step. This leads to inefficient use of the equipment and manpower associated with the first step.
In packaging operations, this is often the case. It occurs that the packaging of individual items into a container can be done faster than the speed at which the individual items can be prepared.
To solve this problem, a plurality of item preparing operations are used to supply items to a packaging station. However, another problem occurs quite often in that the items should be supplied to the packaging station in an orderly array but the items are not supplied from the item preparing operations in such an array because, for example, the item preparing operations are operating individually and not necessarily in concert with one another.
A further problem which sometimes happens is because of, for example, space limitations, the flow path of items coming from item preparing operations must be changed to transport the items to the packaging operation.
Each problem discussed above can individually be present in a manufacturing operation as well as occur in combination.